Re: [boost] [text] [review] Text formal review result

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 23:06, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

On 2020-06-27 20:55, Ville Voutilainen via Boost wrote:

...

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 18:48, Edward Diener via Boost wrote:

...

You have raised a bunch of hackles here. The LEWG, along with all other C++ standard committees, seems to me so much less open to debate than Boost is that it is hard to know what to say about your assertion that "This list is not very welcoming". Nor can anything ever be found out from the C++ standards committee why such and such was accepted or rejected, or what the arguments were about after the fact.

Have you tried asking a committee member, or just asking on std-discussion?

Asking a committee member requires personal interaction, and you have to know who to ask in the first place. Personal interaction is understandably a strong barrier for some.

Well, for future reference, I am happy to entertain reasonable requests for "why was this thing accepted/rejected, can you outline the discussion and the arguments?".

Asking on std-discussion or std-proposals is a possibility. I have tried that a few times, with mixed success. I suspect, a lot of proposal authors don't actively monitor these lists for questions or comments regarding proposals beyond the initial discussion phase, and committee members are either too busy, or not involved in the proposal, or don't reply for any other reason.

The signal/noise ratio of those discussion forums is unfortunately not very good.

As someone who haven't attended the committee meetings personally, but prepared a proposal with a representative, I can say that even obtaining the results of discussion of your own proposal is difficult.

That's unfortunate; you should be able to get that information from the representative. I can slap^Whelpfully guide them what their job as proposal champions is, if you wish.

It is a very reasonable request to have a public searchable access to the result of review and discussion of a given proposal, if only to be able to learn from it or point to when another person comes up with a similar proposal. It may be difficult to implement, but the demand is there.

It's not a question of implementation difficulty, it's more a question of how visible the comments made in a discussion are. There's a difference in discussing technical matters with an open crowd, and with a less open crowd.

...

It also seems to me that there tends to be a multitude of meeting trip reports that cover why such and such was accepted or rejected.

Trip reports do not provide that information beyond the general results of the most prominent proposals. They do not contain the discussion results on every proposal. Besides, a trip report is a perspective of a single person, who may have not even participated in the proposal you're interested in. You'd have to search multiple personal blogs to find such reports, among other posts, from multiple persons, with no certainty you'll find the information you need in the first place.

Fair enough. I merely wonder whether "nor can anything be found" is an accurate/correct statement to make. I am all in favor of improving the communication of feedback to proposal authors. To the general public, I find it non-obvious that there should necessarily be more openness about it. P.S. I'm a Free Software developer, I contribute to GCC and libstdc++ on a fairly regular basis. The virtues of open collaboration are not foreign to me. They aren't necessarily virtues in all situations.